But it was a boast that could be made with some justification with the opening of a museum devoted to the career of Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), not only one of the 20th century's most significant sculptors—known for simplified, abstract forms, often pierced by a hole, that variously evoked nature and the human figure—but one who was raised in Wakefield. If that was not newsworthy enough, the museum that bears her name was designed by Sir David Chipperfield, a leading architect.

The Hepworth gallery cost a recession-defying $57.6 million and is billed as the centerpiece to the city's $165 million regeneration plans. As Wakefield Council leader Peter Box told the watching world: "The real debate is about the effect it will have on the local economy. Wakefield is a better place for the Hepworth."

It is hard to disagree with him. Although this Yorkshire city with its brand-new shopping mall, pedestrian-friendly streets and sturdy Victorian civic buildings does not fulfill the stereotype of postindustrial despondency, it was, nonetheless, hit hard in the 1980s by the closure of coal mines and the collapse of manufacturing. Perhaps it was inevitable that it took inspiration from the success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and followed the example of British museums such as the Baltic in Gateshead and The Lowry in Salford by exploiting culture as a force for renewal.

ENLARGE

'Spring' (1966).
Bowness, Hepworth Estate

Simon Wallis, the enthusiastic director of the museum, says: "It is obviously preposterous to load everything on to us, but the gallery is one part of what I think is an ambitious scheme for regenerating Wakefield. A lot of locals disapproved of it at first, but the money cannot all be spent on shopping centers and housing. Culture has to play a major part."

So if the "real debate" is about the local economy, what about the museum and what about the art?

The building first. It is an uncompromising concrete structure of 10 boxy units with pitched roofs and odd angles. From one perspective it appears to rise straight out of the River Calder where a weir sends the water rushing past.

"It is a building that is proud of its bluntness," Mr. Wallis says, "and that chimes very well with the culture of Yorkshire, where I have never met so many blunt, direct people. That's the culture that Hepworth was part of. What you see is what you get."

Well, not entirely. So often a gallery's reputation can rest on its exterior appearance while the interior disappoints. Mr. Wallis cites Frank Gehry's Bilbao extravaganza, which he considers a "wonderful sculptural object from the outside, but not a good building to experience art."

This is not the case with the Hepworth. Inside it is a place of calm and space. Concealed skylights bathe the exhibits in natural light. And the windows, which seemed rather few and far between from the road, turn out to be ideally positioned to complement the works with their views of disused red-brick warehouses waiting their turn to be restored, the river bank lined with barges, and the town with its cathedral spire and mundane '70s tower blocks.

Hepworth Wakefield

As for the works themselves, the museum has a powerful core of 44 full-size plaster and aluminium models for Hepworth's eventual bronze sculptures. They were the gift of Sophie Bowness, one of the artist's seven grandchildren. The Hepworth also has taken over the city's own collection of more than 6,000 paintings and sculptures, including some by Yorkshire's other celebrated artist, Henry Moore. There is the bonus of a relationship with The Tate in London, which has lent several pieces, including a Brancusi and a Mondrian.

"Imagine a Mondrian, here in Wakefield," exclaims the curator.

But it is the Hepworths we have come to see. The first gallery has only five pieces, including the stark "Figure (Nanjizal)" from 1958; "The Cosdon Head" (1949), a work of simple beauty; and "Spring" (1966), whose hollowed centre frames a horizon of distant hills. This glimpse of Hepworth's Yorkshire is fitting because, as we see in a video, the countryside was crucial to the artist, who as a young girl was taken by her father, a civil engineer, on his working trips across the county. In an extract from a BBC TV film made in 1961, she says: "I remember moving through the landscape with my father in his car and the hills were sculptures, the roads defined the forms."

Such is the clarity of the layout and the juxtaposition of her work with fellow contemporaries that it is possible to follow her development from early endeavors in wood and stone, the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, to the inspiration of two expatriate modernists, the American Jacob Epstein and the Frenchman Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and finally her move into a more pristine abstraction.

The minutiae of her working day from pictures, newspaper cuttings and even her tools contrasts with the monumental prototype of one of her best-known sculptures, the aluminium, 19-foot "Winged Figure" (1963), commissioned for London's John Lewis department store. There are versions in wood and bronze of "Chun Quoit," the inspiration for the "Single Form" that was unveiled outside the United Nations building in New York in 1964.

The Hepworth is part of a bigger picture. Nearby is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 500 acres of parkland dotted with contributions by more than 70 artists, and only a few miles farther is Leeds, with the Henry Moore Institute and its own outstanding art gallery.

As Mr. Wallis says: "It is a sort of golden triangle of organizations with sculpture as its DNA. It is part of a wider Yorkshire identity that the people here rally round, taking pride in the industrial past but also looking to the future. I think that's what the Hepworth Wakefield represents."

It appears to be working. The gallery hoped for 150,000 visitors in its first year, but within the first five weeks 100,000 have come through its doors.

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